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I know this is an older thread but thought I’d add my ‘two bobs’ worth.

I bought the lifetime membership for about $49 about a year ago now. Again, saw the offer through Windows Secrets and thought I’d give it a go. First problem I had was finding out that the offer only included my PC, not network drives. Can’t remember to be honest if this was not mentioned in the deal, only mentioned in the fine print or only made obvious after I’d paid the cash but I’m happy to take the blame there.

The Skyhub dashboard version I was provided was specifically set up to disallow attaching network drives. I got around this by setting up symlinks and that all worked fine. Backed up about 18Gb and used the option to save locally as well, just to speed up restores if required. Things seemed to tick along fine in the background and never needed to call on the backup. Vaguely remember updating the dashboard at some stage but everything seemed to keep working so didn’t really check it out in any detail. I’m a bit paranoid about losing files and also backup locally using Areca (and make image files with Image for Windows) and after a few issues trying out Win10 and reverting to Win7 on a BootItBM multi-boot/multi-partitioned drive, I needed to restore some files. I used my Areca backups and all went fine but I thought I’d take the opportunity to just see how SkyHub was ticking along.

Well, at some point during a Skyhub Dashboard update the interface appears to have changed (if I’m using it correctly … EDIT; I wasn’t, see Edit 2 below). They seem to have tightened the lifetime version down even more so you can’t actually specify which directory to backup. The application generically backs up stuff in ‘My Documents’ and ‘My Pictures’. If you store your images in ‘My Pictures’ and that is on a NAS or USB drive, it seems to ignore it. However, the symlink I set up in the earlier version for ‘My Documents’ that points to a NAS drive seems to still work. I recently moved my images to a folder on a 1Tb USB drive and tried to set up a symlink on C: called ‘My Pictures’ but Skyhub ignores that. Weird.

As for security, there doesn’t appear to be any encryption at all (wrong, see Edit 1 below). My cloud encrypted stuff I put on SpiderOak. I only backup a couple of Mb so I get away with the free membership (2Gb) but you can get 1Tb for $129/yr.

Edit 1: Just found the setting for 256AES encryption. It’s actually changed in the settings page of your Skyhub website login. Your files are encrypted before they are sent.

Edit 2: Okay, I’m an idiot. Just found out how you can use Dashboard to select individual drives. This is what happens when you only look at an application occasionally… you forget how it works. If you click the Skyhub icon in your taskbar, one option you will be given is ‘Turbo’ or ‘Smart’ mode. In Smart mode you get a standard folder/file selection tree to customize your picking.

Just looking for some clarification on ‘Help for picking your next anti-malware tool’. The ‘out of box protection’ (OOBP) showed how many viruses the built-in Defender for Windows 8 and the optional Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows 7 caught before the commercial product being tested (correct?). I would have liked to have seen the OOBPs compared as stand alone products as I’ve solely used Windows OOBP for over five years now and never been caught by a virus/malaware. I know it wasn’t your test, it’s just a shame Windows was ignored by AV-Comparatives.

Fixed it. It was all about either sorting or grouping in File Explorer. Sorry I can’t be more specific but I was in a bit of a frustration filled mouse-clicking frenzy, jumping backwards and forwards between the new ‘My Documents’ folder on the non-network drive and the badly behaving M: drive. I think it was grouping based on date that I must have set up at some time (though I’m sure it was behaving badly before this). I’ve moved the ‘My Documents’ location back to M: and it is still behaving correctly. Anyway, all sorted.
Guess it must have been struggling to group files on a non-indexed network drive.

Okay, the locations tab is there because M: drive was a targeted location for ‘My Documents’. I moved that location elsewhere, off a network drive (the process copied all my files to that new location, I think because M: was mapped network drive). This new location works perfectly and doesn’t do the endlessly slow ‘indexing’. M: is still slow but the ‘Locations’ tab has gone.

Went back to basics after finding out that re-mounting the drive with a new letter seems to fix the problem and tried a comparison between a working version (T: ) and the faulty version (M: ). Did this by selecting the menu options ToolsFolder Options… and the ViewCustomize this Folder…

ToolsFolder Options… is the same for both mounts (and I have set all options to default where possible and made sure the options are the same if a default selection wasn’t available).

ViewCustomize this Folder… is different. I have attached screen snaps to help explain. M: has an extra tab called ‘Locations’ (as shown in first image) and under the ‘Customize’ tab it is missing the complete ‘Folder pictures’ selections you can see in the second image (T: ). Other than those differences, everything else is the same.

No idea what this means.

Just noticed something very interesting. If I’m in accessing an application that has me attaching files (e.g. happened 2 minutes ago in Thunderbird) the attachment window comes up and looks almost exactly the same as a standard Explorer window but it behaves as I’d expect. All folders and files are displayed almost instantly. Could there be some option I’ve selected in Explorer that causes some sort of intensive re-indexing every time? I don’t have thumbnails displayed (generally go for a ‘details’ view) and I don’t think I’ve got anything special selected in the details, as a matter of fact at the moment, it only displays filename but the ‘indexing’ problem persists.

Hi Bigmac56,
Okay, the support fix didn’t work. So, next thing I tried was the UNC addressing. I currently have the drive mapped to M:, so rather than remove that mapping, I just mapped to another letter. TADAH!!! Worked perfectly. So, I then went to map M:drive using UNC, thinking that would fix everything and singing your praises as Win7 guru.
Unfortunately, the behavior persists when using the ‘M:’ letter selection. I want to keep this as there are some paths that are expecting to see things in that drive.
So, what is happening with M: that causes this never ending indexing/searching… etc?
As a last resort I’m going to un-map, shutdown/reboot, re-map and see if it goes away.

… nope, didn’t work. Still rebuilding the whole index.

Thanks anyway, Andy.

Hi Fred,

Liked the ideas about using Disk Cleanup but the ‘Clean up system files’ button you mentioned wasn’t there. I’m using Win7 64 bit and I have enabled UAC (the UAC solution was suggested in a couple of Google searches… didn’t work for me).

Cheers, Andy.

Hi Fred,

Okay, first bit of feedback. Your column covers five subjects (bootable USB drives, Windows 8 updates, cloning CDs/DVDs, free search tools) and I want to comment on one of them. Hence, this feedback has nothing to do with bootable USB drives, but this is where your Windows Secrets link for feedback takes me… so here it is.

Free search tools. Have you noticed how bad Windows handles searching on network drives and the lame solution for speeding up fast searches using indexes is? Options include copying the entire contents of your network drive to one of your fixed drives (really Windows? That’s a solution? Copy terrabytes of data to your fixed gigabyte size system drive?) or use some dodgy logical link solution that sometimes works, sometimes works for a while, sometimes never works?

After a bit of research I found out that it really isn’t Windows fault. What Windows does (and I’m talking lots of versions here) is to expect its’ network drives to (1) be Windows based and (2) do the indexing ‘natively’ then have those available for Windows to access and read. Windows itself doesn’t do the indexing. Too bad if (1) your D-Link network drive uses a version of Linux as its operating system and (2) it doesn’t create the index for Windows to use. I’ve re-visited this problem a number of times over the last few years and finally a (sort of) solution has appeared. I have a discovered a third party application that will build an index of a drive for quick searches. It also ties in to Scheduler so you can update the index automatically and lets you configure enormously complicated searches that you’ll never use. You can’t have Explorer use it directly but it is still very flexible. Try LOCATE (http://www.locate32.net). Not an ideal solution (would be great if it built an Explorer readable index) but it’s not bad.

Anyway, might help all those people with slow to read, non Windows network drives.

Hi Fred,

In relation to the WiFi issues that Dave was having, I have just completed two days of VERY frustrating problems with my home WiFi network. Won’t bore you with too many intimate details (messing about with ipconfig, clearing DNS caches… on and on from tips resulting from many google searches) I found out that my dropouts were being caused by a pair of wireless headphones that my wife got for Christmas. Even though they weren’t in use, they occasionally fired up all by themselves to trickle charge their batteries. That charging period my be a couple of minutes, or a couple of hours, but due to frequency interference, they wiped out the network that was served by a repeater access point located in very close proximity to the headphones.

Bit more investigating to go to see if relocating the charger, changing channels on the WiFi or throwing the headphones out the window will offer a more permanent solution than what I do now; simply keep the headphones switched off at the wall until they’re needed.

Cheers, Andy.

I got something very similar via a different route; disguised as a packing note for a DHL shipment in an email (had nothing to do with DHL of course). I would normally never have opened it but I was expecting a package from overseas. McAfee told me the email was clean but I was extra careful. It was an attached zip file (that I detached and scanned separately with McAfee and it reported clean), then a ‘pdf’ file (that I scanned with McAfee and it reported clean) that I ran and saw no pdf file but all the same looking pop ups that Fred got. McAfee offered to help me get rid of it for a fee (after being a loyal customer for over 10 years) but running Malawarebytes from safe mode and rkill.com (a small tool to kill suspect processes) took care of it in about 30 mins. I no longer run McAfee and as a test used MSE to scan the same email file. It picked it first time, so I’m happy with MSE.

Hi Lincoln,

Loved the column but it really opened a can of worms when it came to putting my document, music, video folders into the library. I have those folders on a network drive; a D-Link DNS-323. I had all sorts of problems trying to get the drive recognized by my WIN 7 Professional 64 bit system. I think I found a workaround by using Sync Center to make the files available offline (which really defeats the purpose of having a network drive, you have to copy all the files onto your system hard drive), then disabling sync’ing after the indexes are built (which deletes the copies on your local system drive). I THINK it worked, but I’m not really sure. Don’t know if it built a full index, or just an index of the files that were copied over before I stopped the sync process. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing.

This site is typical of the frustration people are feeling trying to get this done (even adds a new Microsoft conspiracy theory; MS want us to only buy their file servers): Microsoft Forum http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/afb904c1-1c61-4aae-b6b1-5cf525b9f8de

Anyway, if you could look at this problem and come up with a simple solution/explanation, that would be great.

Thanks for a great column, Andy.

This behavior (logging in and finding you have a temporary profile) is very common in Win 7 (and even Vista). It was even discussed in an earlier post on the lounge.

The typical fix is to log out and back in. This fix has work for me almost every time. …

Yes I did read about that. It wasn’t working for me though. Always went back to a black desktop and almost no icons.

You definitely want relocated system folders to be found every time, so to put them on a networked drive is a bit extreme

Yep, seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now I know better. It was just a desperate attempt to deal with the ‘system disk that ate New York’… it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger…

One day, it’s all going back where it belongs.

Thanks everyone.

I’ve tried checking the headers on one of the offending emails however, there isn’t really much I can tell from them. I’ve compared them to valid emails from my son and can’t see anything that could be considered unusual.

I’ve run the IP addresses through http://temerc.com/Check_Spammers/ and the worst that comes up is some addresses listed on the PBL, which doesn’t appear to be a bad thing.

We’ve used Malawarebytes and Nortons’ free scan shows some minor tracking cookies but nothing else. I haven’t had a chance to run the SUPERAntiSpyware yet as the computer (which is a laptop) was being used today at Uni.

All in all, I think the decision is to trash his email address and close the account as it looks like it may actually be one of the stolen Hotmail addresses. If further investigation turns up anything, I’ll let you know.

Thanks again for all your great advice.

Cheers, Andy.